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Quothling | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fact I think they are one of the better IT business partners for non-tech Enterprise. Often what they sell is vastly underestimated by their critics within the EU, not that I disagree with the problematic nature of depending on foreign tech companies either. With the proposed deregulation of US tech and their "freeing", however, I wonder if a lot of organisations will be capable of continuing using US tech services or it'll move in the direction of how Chinese (and other) services aren't legally available for a lot of things.
physicsguy | parent | next
I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.
Quothling | root | parent | next
It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.
GTP | root | parent
I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
margorczynski | root | parent | next
Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.

If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)

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Quothling | root | parent | next
> Office 365 platform

Moving away from that would be a massive change management undertaking, but it's not the "Office" part which is our primary challenge. To be fair, I'm not sure we could actually survive the change management required to leave the Office and Windows part, as it would be completely unfamiliar territory for like 95% of our employees, but the collective we at least think that we can. We have quite a lot of Business Central 365 instances, the realistic alternative to those would be Excel (but not Excel). SharePoint is also a semi-massive part of our business as it's basically our "Document Warehouse".

I guess maybe I'm using the 365 term wrong?

GTP | root | parent
I didn't know about business central, a quick Google search tells me it's an ERP. There are alternatives, but migrating an ERP is definitely more problematic than changing document storage and the applications you use to read and write documents. But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?
Quothling | root | parent | next
> But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?

You're not missing anything, but that's our current exit strategy none the less. We need to be capable of exiting Microsoft within a month if required. It even says Excel in our strategy even though it would obviously need to be a different spreadsheet program. Well, maybe we would be allowed to use non-cloud Excel, I'm not too sure about that actually. I'm only involved in these things from SWE side of things where I have to give them a strategy for our part, which is very easy because everything is containerized and almost non-platform dependent, so it would be relatively easy to migrate away from Azure. The biggest challenge for our part of the business would be our reliance on AD (well Entra ID) authentication flows. Not a big challenge as far as the actual auth flows, because we could easily accept tokens from something like Keycloak but it would be a challenge to migrate the AD for the SysOps guys.

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the5avage | root | parent | next
One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter. It can cost a lot when that happens.
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casey2 | root | parent
They just mean that they would have to do real work and not just sit on their ass goofing off on the internet all day. Real work is something the last few generations are "allergic" to, it gives them the "ick". They somehow got it into their head that doing work is bad and that you should only rely on other peoples work, I blame Gates and public education.
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onli | root | parent | next
Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.
amai | root | parent
My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.
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